The Whale hit the brambles like a cruise missile.

  Shredded, snapped wood and spikes the size of my fingers shot everywhere. They jammed themselves into the walls. Into my arms. Shot through the water and peppered my legs—somehow, even though they shouldn’t be able to, they ripped through the water like it wasn’t there. The brambles around the boss exploded.

  The ones around Calvin did, too—but they did it a lot slower.

  It took me a minute to figure out what had happened. As I smashed the Trip-Hammer through the Whale’s skin and blubber—sending jets of red blood spraying out into the flooded casino like full-blaze fire hoses—I mentally reread the Thorned Hammer’s ability.

  The wielder of this hammer may cast Armistice of Thorns once per day.

  Armistice of Thorns: The caster summons walls of sharp, spiked thorns around all combatants in a thirty-foot radius. The thorns may be broken, but will deal damage when attacked. Lasts one minute.

  “Calvin, you lucky bastard,” I muttered.

  The Whale’s body slam had counted as an attack, since it was aimed in Calvin’s direction. Meanwhile, Calvin hadn’t moved a muscle. He couldn’t have—it would have counted his motion as an attack otherwise. But he wouldn’t have, no matter what. The man barely fought to keep himself alive, and even then, only until he absolutely didn’t have to. His thorns had shredded the attacking boss, while it hadn’t hurt him at all.

  The Trip-Hammer revved, another gout of blood blasted across the room, and Calvin sputtered as it poured down on him and Jessica.

  He hadn’t gotten off free. The Whale still weighed as much as a tractor-trailer of cows, and it had still landed on him. He had broken ribs and arms, and one leg was twisted at a horrific angle. But Jessica was working on him.

  We all were. With the Whale no longer able to move freely, it was only a matter of time until we killed it. And with its death—

  Boss Defeated: The Whale

  Dungeon Delvers who were not in the arena will receive fifty percent of your team’s experience.

  “Hal, I said I had him,” Jessica sighed.

  Tome of the Royal Flush (Epic)

  User learns the spell Royal Flush, which creates a wave that rips across the battlefield. The power of the wave increases with the caster’s Body points.

  Coin Toss (Epic, Charge 12)

  +8 Awareness, +6 Mana

  This coin has an infinite number of sides, and each flip applies a different buff or debuff to the user. Debuffs will never be lethal, but will always be detrimental. The user may flip the coin once every hour.

  Lucky and Good (Rare, Charge 10)

  +4 Awareness, +10 Mana

  These paired daggers are only magical when used together. Lucky allows its user to quickly find weak spots in its targets, increasing their effective Awareness when dealing precision damage by 20. Good increases the efficiency of healing spells, allowing the user to cast more spells before exhaustion.

  My dad had never been a gambler. I shook my head at the pile of loot. “You guys can have all this.” Lucky and Good went to Jessica—she protested at first, but even if she didn’t get much value out of the first dagger, the second one’s power would be more than useful enough for her. We’d be at war soon enough, and she’d pushed herself well past the point of exhaustion healing after the Crusade’s attack on Museumtown.

  I expected Zane or Tori to take the Tome of the Royal Flush, but to my surprise, Carol grabbed it instead. “I’m not exactly stacking Body, but I’ve got more of it than anything else. I think I can make it work with the whip, too.”

  And that left Coin Toss. Calvin reluctantly took it, saying that it might be helpful for out-of-combat buffs. None of us had a slot for it in our equipment, so I didn’t mind. We also got an additional item just like the Warrior’s Sheath—although this one was called Deep Pockets. Tori took it and immediately started moving gear around, trying to find the best setup she could.

  If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the violation.

  “If we’re done here,” Calvin said, “We should get moving. We ain’t got time to waste.”

  “Agreed. That should have bought us enough time for the Crusade to stop watching. Let’s get back on the road,” I said, and we left the Wheels of Fate dungeon behind. I was just as glad to see the back of it; while Bobby Richards would have been happy in it, I definitely hadn’t been.

  I spent most of the trip back to Museumtown watching Carol.

  She’d turned into a killing machine—her Skirmisher class gave her a ton of flexibility in handling problems, although she usually stayed as a Warrior. More importantly, she was hitting well above her level. While she hadn’t gotten any weapons from Tier Three Dungeons yet, her equipment gave her a big edge.

  She couldn’t hit as hard as the Trip-Hammer without using her weapon’s limited ability, but she maintained control of the battlefield very smoothly. Between the whip, her spear, and the Royal Flush wave, she didn’t need to get in close anymore, and enemies couldn’t close the gap with her. Even against the biggest monsters we found on our way back to Chicago, she could hold her own.

  And that gave me an idea.

  I hadn’t leveled once in that Tier Two Dungeon. Granted, we’d been shoving experience at Calvin and Jessica, and both of them were Thirty-Nine now. But even so, I’d expected a level from the three bosses we’d killed.

  That only left the Seared Wilds Tower for leveling options. It wasn’t viable—we could farm it, but it’d just leave other people out in the cold.

  But Carol wasn’t kicking monster butt because of her levels. She was doing it with her equipment.

  When we got to Museumtown, I pulled Tori aside. “I know how we’re going to beat the experience bottleneck without killing people—and without cutting everyone else out of the Seared Wilds Tower.”

  “Duh,” Tori said. “Gear, right?”

  “Uh, how’d you know?”

  “Simple. This isn’t exactly like a level cap, but there are places in a lot of my games where no matter what your level is, you can’t progress without upgrading your gear. Since we can’t progress, it’s either PvP or build optimization. I’m starting to feel it—like the gear I got in our first Tier One Dungeons isn’t pulling its weight anymore. I’ve still got Perfection’s Gaze. More unbelievably, I’m still using Perfection’s Gaze. There has to be a better option.”

  “Okay, so you saw this the whole time?”

  Tori shook her head. Then she shrugged, looking a little embarrassed. “Not until today. I’m a little rusty.”

  “So, we’re focusing on our builds, then?” I asked.

  “Sure. We can farm some dungeons for build-specific items. But Hal, can you…?”

  I waited.

  Tori started again. Then she stopped. Then she started one more time. “Listen, I need you to work on something for me. Perfection’s Gaze has…the ability is too good to ignore, but the stats are…”

  “Lacking?” I asked. I already knew what was coming, and I had no idea how to say no to her.

  “Can you fix that?”

  “Tori, I…I don’t know. I’ve only got so much Charge. Right now, I’m Level Sixty-Six, with 94 Charge. I’m using almost all of that running my gear and my rovers, and I want to get the Explorer running soon.”

  “Come on, Hal. We’ve just gotta figure out how to jam more Charge into your build. We do that and you’ll be good to go! So will I.”

  I sighed. Sometimes, Tori could be pretty single-minded, and she did need it for her build—or at least, she thought she did. “How about we check out the dungeon list Calvin’s been working on tomorrow, figure out what we can clear for a replacement, and I get to keep my Charge for my projects?”

  “Fine. If you can’t help me out, at least we can get some dungeons done and try for an upgrade.” Tori didn’t meet my eye, and she left, heading for her mom’s clinic. I sighed and looked up at the stars. They looked…wrong. Half of them were in the wrong place, and none of the constellations I’d been so familiar with on the farm were visible. Then again, I hadn’t gotten a great look at them after Integration started, and just the fact that I could see stars at all in Chicago was nothing short of a miracle.

  I looked for Calvin for a few minutes—if I could get a good look at the book, maybe I could plan out a few dungeons and get us signed up for their next reset. But he was nowhere to be found. When he wanted to disappear, Calvin could be almost invisible.

  I sighed again and walked out of town, heading for Cindy’s Garage. If we were going to focus on gear as the bottleneck solution, I had my work cut out for me.

  Tori was pissed.

  She’d gotten a lot better at dealing with it since the apocalypse started, though—especially now that Jessica—Mom, that is—didn’t need her glued to someone’s ass every time she wanted to leave Museumtown.

  The Level Twenty monsters nearby weren’t a threat to her, and she wasn’t planning on exploring the brambles. She just wanted to blow off some steam.

  Mostly by exploding those same Level Twenty monsters.

  She’d seen the build optimization solution on the way back to Museumtown. It had a lot of appeal. For one thing, it made a lot of sense. Reaching Rank One had been the equivalent of leveling up ten times all at once for her, and pretty similar for Zane and Carol, too. Carol had actually gotten the least power from it—Tori had asked while the older girl was too excited to keep secrets, so she knew. But it had still been close to ten levels.

  And equipment with a bunch of stats on it was like gaining levels. Temporary ones. She’d talked to Hal and knew about his early plan to use the Lock-Grip Gloves as an emergency Body point—his idea was to have it act just like leveling up. It hadn’t worked out, but the idea was right.

  Tori Crushed a Crush-tacean. She snorted at the irony of its death. Then she kept looking for something else to kill. The experience was almost nothing. She wasn’t getting any closer to a level-up. But that didn’t matter.

  She wasn’t here to level.

  So, when Hal had figured it out too, that had just been confirmation that she was right. It was about gear.

  But he wouldn’t help her build the gear she needed. The Perfection’s Gaze helmet was perfect for her. She just needed more stats on it. And Hal either wouldn’t or couldn’t do it—Tori wasn’t sure which. It was just so goddamned frustrating.

  She killed a few more monsters. It helped—a little.

  “Maybe I should talk to Carol,” she said to herself as she walked back toward the ever-growing Museumtown. There had to be—what? Ten thousand people? Maybe more? There had to be at least ten thousand people there, all living in tents or semi trailers—or inside the Field Museum. Those people were crazy.

  But of those ten thousand, Tori only wanted to hear Carol’s opinion. She was pretty smart. And cool. She’d know what to do.